A 12.6% unemployment rate among recent fine art graduates is not the worst statistic to be confronted with upon graduation.

Within that 12.6% lies an even higher number of lower job prospects – a number that hasn’t even been calculated before, because it is so sad. In fact, a recent statistic confirms that our university’s fine art program has more unemployed graduates right now than there are pedophiles looking for work as babysitters.

You’re at Café Chi-Chi. The ambience is affable. You sit across the table from your husband, partner, beloved, or cheatmate. He’s wearing Google I-Glasses, Prototype 3, Version 4.0. It’s 2017. People around act cool but secretly glance at him. You see the yearning, hungry looks.

“I won the glasses at the Google game-play day,” he says smoothly, his blue eyes shimmering. “Only three guests got them. The rest got ping-pong paddles. I’m going to OrangeRayTape you now, okay?”

Instructions: Please choose Yes or No in response to the following statements about yourself. If you are not sure how to answer, grab a coloring book instead. When you are done answering, press the “Score Me” button and your responses will be emailed to your mother, ex-spouse, and 7th-grade teacher so that all of their suspicions can be confirmed.

Nobody ever told me why the scientists decided to answer the question, but they must have cleared out every orphanage in the country to do it.

The first hour of the experiment was the toughest. Kids headbutted me in the crotch, and I caught enough shin kicks to limp for a week. Bite mark scars still shimmer along my fingers. I punched their child-sized temples and mule kicked their soft little sternums hard enough to make their chests pop.

Unit X-397 said, “Yeah, but this doesn’t fit the standard pattern at all. I don’t even know if you can legitimately categorize it as an apocalypse.” The mid-45th-century repurposed sex-bot waved one silvered, gleaming hand vaguely at the rift, and what lay beyond.

Bobby peered through the tear in spacetime at the acres of rolling hills and the distant mountains. The sky was blue. The effect was bucolic. He felt his heart sink, if possible, lower than it already was.